This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 (...) presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life. (shrink)

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a show that focused on teaching children an ethics of caring for oneself and care for others. This article examines those ethics through the songs “I Like You As You Are” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It contends that these songs focus on a celebration of the self and others, welcoming individuals as they are into the community, and embracing authenticity. This article looks to understand these ethics in a contemporary setting and argues that Mister (...) Rogers and the communal ethics of care that he taught are needed. (shrink)

A wave of interest in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as bio-political thinkers was initiated by publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. The intellectual connection of these two figures is, however, broader than their bio-political considerations. Arendt and Foucault both offer detailed accounts of an ethico-political self. Both Arendt’s and Foucault’s later work explores the meaning of living ethically and politically. By examining the relationship between self, ethics and politics, I suggest there are two general points of convergence in Arendt (...) and Foucault regarding the ethico-political self: a shared suspicion of ethical or political systems presented as universally applicable; the attempt to undermine prescriptive moral and political models by fostering a dynamic and critical self-relationship. In the shared attempt to develop a dynamic ethico-political attitude Arendt and Foucault present their respective alternatives to universally applicable moral and political structures, which both consider to be potentially dangerous. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo examina as considerações de Nietzsche acerca das fontes sociais e históricas do eu como um contra-argumento à concepção liberal de indivíduo. Defendo que Nietzsche oferece não apenas uma crítica contundente à concepção associal e previamente individuada de pessoa, à qual se conecta a noção liberal de liberdade, como ainda um contra-conceito alternativo de pessoa e de soberania. Seus argumentos visam mostrar, em sua dimensão crítica, que o indivíduo ou pessoa é inseparável de seus objetivos ou valores, que (...) são socialmente constituídos, e que nossa capacidade como indivíduos, especialmente para a agência soberana, é o produto de uma longa história e pré-história social. Em sua dimensão construtiva, encontramos em Nietzsche a contra alegação de que a manutenção e o cultivo de nossas capacidades são dependentes de relações de um antagonismo ponderado entre nós mesmos enquanto indivíduos, ou antes: como dividua. Esses argumentos serão desenvolvidos no que se segue em consonância com quatro principais linhas de pensamento: sobre as origens sociais e o caráter da consciência ; sobre a história e a constituição social de nossa capacidade como indivíduos soberanos [sovereign] ; sobre as origens sociais do fenômeno moral ; e sobre a destruição fisiológica do sujeito moral substancial, seguida da reconstrução fisiológica.This essay examines Nietzsche's thought on the social and historical sources of the self as a counter-argument against the liberal concept of the individual. Nietzsche, it is argued, offers a powerful critique of the asocial, antecedently individuated concept of personhood, to which the liberal notion of freedom is attached, but also an alternative counter-concept of personhood and sovereignty. On the critical side are arguments to the effect that the individual or person is inseparable from its ends or values, which in turn are socially constituted, and that our capacities as individuals, especially for sovereign agency, are the product of a long social history and pre-history. On the positive side is the constructive counter-claim that the maintenance and cultivation of our capacities for productive, autonomous agency is dependent on relations of measured antagonism both between and within us as individuals, or rather: as dividua. These arguments are reconstructed along four main lines of thought: on the social origins and character of consciousness ; on the history and social constitution of our capacities as sovereign individuals ; on the social origins of moral phenomena, understood as internalisations of communal norms ; and Nietzsche's physiological destruction of the substantial moral subject, coupled with the physiological reconstruction of the subject as dividuum. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

What is the significance of Arendt considering the title Amor Mundi for what we now are familiar with as The Human Condition? Read alongside Native American philosophers, it is clear that The Human Condition does not explain what it is like to love the world. Instead, it is a powerful genealogy of world alienation and earth alienation in the Western tradition. In other words, The Human Condition shows how Western thought lost and/or undermines amor mundi. By comparing and contrasting Arendt (...) with Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, we can better understand what Arendt means by the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ and see the limitations of her concept of world. My claim is that reading these thinkers together enriches our understanding of world alienation, earth alienation, and amor mundi. (shrink)

This paper presents what I will call Arendt’s genealogy of thinking. My purpose in doing so is to strengthen Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness which I believe is both a powerful, but underappreciated analytic tool and a consistent, but under-examined thread that occurs throughout Arendt’s oeuvre. To do so I revisit her phenomenology of thinking and the distinction between thinking and cognition she introduces in her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. When read alongside the genealogy of action in (...) The Human Condition to create a parallel genealogy of thinking, we can begin to see that the implications of this distinction between thinking and cognition are radical, challenging, and deeply important. (shrink)

Europe is facing a wave of refugees and migrants. To solve the many inherent problems is primarily a practical political task. However, there are existential experiences, democratic values, human attitudes, and political principles involved, and I am going to look particularly to the following three aspects of the refugee crisis, 1) the existential, 2) the political, and 3) the legal. Finally, I will make a concluding remark on education’s task.

The paper offers a contribution to the political account of wonder. The rationale for addressing this problem is provided by Hannah Arendt’s observations on the paradoxical relationship between wonder and politics—wonder appears here as both essential and indispensable to politics as the realm of opinions. This quandary corresponds to two common-sense uses of the term “wonder”—as an emotion and as an act of judging. It is argued that the political interpretation of wonder should link these two poles. Drawing on Martha (...) Nussbaum’s account of wonder and its reformulation developed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, the paper offers such a synthesis by emphasising the environmental and aesthetic dimensions of the concept. (shrink)

Heidegger’s critique of European nihilism seeks to expose self-legislation as the governing principle of central manifestations of modernity such as science, technology, and the interpretation of art as aesthetics. Need we accept the conclusion that modern constitutional democracies are intrinsically nihilistic, insofar as they give political and legal form to the principle of collective self-legislation? An answer to this question turns on the concept of power implied in constituent and constituted power. A confrontation of the genealogies of modern subjectivity proposed (...) by Heidegger and Blumenberg suggests that there is indeed a metaphysical core to the concept of constituent power developed by various political theorists, including Schmitt and Habermas. By contrast, closer consideration of the paradoxical relation between constituent and constituted power illuminates the ambiguity of collective self-legislation, which means both enactment of a legal order by a collective self and the enactment of a collective self by a legal order. To the extent that constitutional democracies are a way of preserving rather than dissolving this ambiguity, they imply an interpretation of power and human finitude that parries the charge of nihilism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe role of exemplification and exemplars is receiving increasing attention in educational theory. Usually, this is connected to emulation models in character and moral education. Exemplars in this framework are those who show us how to act and what to do, and inspire us emotionally to improve. In Hannah Arendt’s unfinished work on judgement, the exemplar plays a different role. Instead of functioning as an inspiration for behavioural change, the exemplar inspires thinking. In Men in Dark Times and the lecture (...) series ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’, we find a collection of texts describing in detail some of the intellectual inspirations for Arendt’s work on exemplarity and judgement. In this paper, I will use an exploration of these texts as a starting point for considering the role of exemplarity in the development of educational judgement. (shrink)

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the ?political nature of history.? I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in (...) the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with (...) radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history. (shrink)

In this article, I try to explore some of the elements of the potential for active citizenship, as conceptualized by Hannah Arendt. Inspired by, but not limited to her work, I attempt to find some important common points of the Arendtian reconceptualization of politics and the prospects for a feminist analysis of the conditions for active citizenship and gender equality within a post-socialist context. On the other hand, I would like to show how, within an East European context, the feminist (...) approach that wants to be useful for a concrete analysis and inspire substantial actions cannot avoid the questions of the relationship between the social and political as argued by Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. (...) While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization. (shrink)

La hipótesis de este ensayo es que la fundación de la filosofía política, disciplina que Arendt definió como el intento de una huida completa de la política, puede entenderse como uno de los momentos decisivos de la conformación progresiva de lo que Foucault llamó la historia de la voluntad de saber occidental. A partir de esa suposición, examinamos en una lectura cruzada el análisis arendtiano del paso de la acción al gobierno en Platón y la lectura foucaultiana de la exclusión (...) del sofisma en Aristóteles. Mostramos finalmente en qué la arqueología del mundo de la acción anterior a la filosofía política que Arendt propone, en torno a cierta figura ambigua de Sócrates, se diferencia de la teoría estratégica del discurso que Foucault encuentra en la sofística, y nos interrogamos por las implicaciones políticas de esta diferencia, especialmente en lo que apunta a repensar hoy las relaciones entre el pensamiento y la acción. (shrink)

The article asks why and how Hannah Arendt framed The Human Condition as a history of modern science. It answers that, in telling the history of instrumental rationality and the work of the experim...

It has often been argued that Hannah Arendt ‘let off’ Eichmann through her concept of the banality of evil. In this paper I argue, through revisiting and modifying the concept of the banality of evil, that we can reject such criticism. That is, by judging that a perpetrator, like Eichmann, commits evil banally in no way undermines the grounds for holding them to be responsible for their actions, but it does help us to understand why such perpetrators act as they (...) do and to teach us how we might prevent such evil from occurring again. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s account of the relationship between politics and morality. Many critics have argued that Arendt’s conception of political action lacks any moral foundations, while others have tried to focus on her understanding of thinking as a normative source of her ethics. In contrast to these views, I present an alternative explanation and argue that the sources of Arendt’s political ethics are located neither in the faculty of thinking nor in extrapolitical moral norms or rules, but in (...) the ontological conditions of action, specifically worldliness, natality and plurality. This interpretation allows us to make sense of Arendt’s fragmented, unsystematic accounts of the various virtues and moral dispositions required for authentic politics: courage, responsibility, care, respect, moderation, solidarity and gratitude. In particular, an inquiry into the ontological sources of political ethics provides a solid normative grounding for the two moral dispositions—promise and forgiveness—that form an explicit “moral code” of political action for Arendt. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to clarifying Hannah Arendt’s concept of political freedom by the means of analysing its structure. My analysis proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I distinguish a pre-political concept of freedom as exercising spontaneity, which is at the root of Arendt’s understanding of political freedom. Secondly, I analyse her account of freedom as exercising action and indicate its relationship to the elementary freedom of spontaneity. Arendt endowed action with a distinguished importance, since she assumed that it is the (...) only activity within the vita activa, which has a special anthropological and axiological significance. According to Arendt, only action allows one to truly experience the fundamental aspect of the human condition, which is the fact of human plurality; it is also the only activity which allows one to exercise specifically public principles, such as solidarity, equality, or justice. Thirdly, I indicate how these two accounts of freedom translate into Arendt’s concept of political freedom. This analysis reveals that the Arendtian concept of political freedom is markedly original. She did not define it in a usual manner, i.e. through indicating bundles of legal and political rights which determine the accepted scope of participation in the public affairs. The inherent part of her concept of political freedom is a specific account of how it must be exercised. Political freedom understood as the participation in governance exercised through action is not merely an activity of instrumental, but also anthropological and axiological importance, which is due to the special anthropological and axiological meaning of action. In the final section, I discuss the practical dimension of Arendt’s theory. She doubted whether the traditional representative democracy is capable of accommodating her ‘rich’ ideal of political freedom, therefore she proposed an alternative account of political system based on councils. I formulate objections against this proposition and demonstrate that councils would presumably fail to accommodate Arendt’s exacting account of political freedom. (shrink)

Flagging labor governance in far-flung supply networks has prompted greater scrutiny of instrumental CSR and calls for models that are tethered more closely to accountability, constraint, and oversight. Political CSR is an apt response, but this paper seeks to buttress its deliberative moorings by arguing that the agonist notion of ‘domesticated conflict’ provides a necessary foundation for substantive deliberation. Because deliberation is more viable and effective when coupled with some means of coercion, a concept of CSR solely premised on reciprocal (...) corporate-stakeholder engagement is pre-mature; efforts should first be directed toward the antecedents of reciprocity and how it is to be achieved, and only then does deliberation become a reliably substantive exercise. The resulting account of agonistic CSR is generated through agonistic principles of realism, pro-action, contestation, and countervailence, and illustrated by the Bangladesh Accord. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” (...) for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education? (shrink)

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is (...) often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another. (shrink)

In the literature on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, two sorts of claim have been made by different interpreters. First, there is Beiner’s observation that there is a shift in Arendt’s thoughts on judgment, which has led to the idea that Arendt develops two distinct theories of judgment. The second sort of claim concerns Arendt’s use of Kant’s transcendental principles. At its core, it has led to the critique that Arendt detranscendentalizes — or empiricalizes — Kant, by linking (...) Kant’s judgments of taste to an empirical sociability. In this article, I argue against both of these claims. Early fragments of Arendt’s on judgment make clear that she develops only one theory of judgment. It is only that it is not until later in her life that she fully elaborates it. Nor does Arendt confuse Kant’s idea of enlarged thinking with an actual dialogue with others. In fact, Arendt introduces an interesting interdependence between judgment and speech, or communication. I develop my argument by first outlining the problems Arendt hoped to resolve via judgment. Through my reading of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I show how Arendt interprets Kant’s Critique of Judgment not as his theory of aesthetic judgments, but as an answer to the more general question ‘How do I judge?’ I also clarify the difference Arendt draws between common sense and community sense. With community sense, Arendt uncovers a foundation not only for men as political beings but also for the idea of humanity. This finding is often overlooked in the literature. I conclude with another Arendtian distinction that is often overlooked, that between spectators and the solitary philosopher. (shrink)

Summary This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (...) (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ?political not metaphysical? (shrink)

among all those magnificent horned beasts at the head of which Monsieur le Préfet does us the honour of being seated, him standing at the prow of the splendid herd of the local bovine race, and taking the helm with a clear and watchful eye, while the sails, propelled by the magnificent native draught horse, carry along the straight course of prosperity the man of Champagne, who does not fear its twists and turns The Prisoner of the Buddha, Franquin, Greg, (...) Jidehem. (shrink)

(2013). ‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.743156.

One way of coming to terms with Platonic wonder is to examine what types of things in the dialogues elicit the pathos in the first place. My primary goal in this paper is to examine what evokes the wonder of Socrates and his interlocutors in a number of these works, and I will pay particularly close attention to what Plato has to say about the wondrous nature of humanity itself. I will show that Plato depicts Socrates and other characters found (...) in the dialogues, such as the young Theaetetus, as not only wonderers of the first rank, but also true wonders in themselves. (shrink)

This paper aims to impregnate the concept of educational leadership with new meanings and new possibilities. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, particularly, her concepts of plurality and natality alongside the distinction she made between who and what we are, to propose a new ethics for educational leadership. An ethics of plurality and natality resists a dominant understanding of education as developing a what, namely, producing persons with particular qualities and talents. I include a research story from the field (...) of early childhood education to illustrate why pluralizing the identities of children by revealing their who-ness through pedagogical narratives should be considered as a significant dimension of contemporary educational leadership. (shrink)

Philosophy is one of the least inclusive disciplines in the humanities and this situation is changing only very slowly. In this article I consider how one of the women of the Wartime Quartet, Iris Murdoch, can help to challenge this situation. Taking my cue from feminist and philosophical practices, I focus on Murdoch's experience of being a woman and a philosopher and on the role experience plays in her philosophical writing. I argue that her thinking is best characterised with the (...) notion of common sense orsensus communis. This term recognises her understanding of philosophy as based in experience and as a shared effort ‘to make sense of our life’, as Mary Midgley puts it. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s fierce critique of sovereignty, along with her excavation of Greek agonism, has gained much traction among critical theorists of international politics who revisit the basic assumptions of conventional international theories, such as state sovereignty and power as domination. This paper engages with an increasingly popular stream within such critical international studies that appropriates Arendt’s agonism to envision a form of a global public acting in concert. I argue that Arendt’s thoughts cannot be reduced to a radical vision of (...) agonistic cosmo-politics. Rather, her thinking suggests that political actors appreciate and care for their public worlds while remaining alert to institutional ossification. Her appreciation of the constitutional state confirms that state agency is an important element of her thoughts. By examining the vicissitudes of publicity found in Arendt’s thinking and their reflexive effect on inter-polity relations, the article elucidates the grounds of her international agonism and brings home a form of international politics where states pursuing the domestic goal of greatness coexist and cooperate. Thus, the study suggests that critical scholars of radical agonism miss the important implications of an “institutional” Arendt for international politics. (shrink)

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year. In the ongoing debate about post-truth it is generally assumed that facts and truth have ceased to be relevant to politics. However, questions are seldom raised about the role of truth-claims in politics, why facts matter in political contexts, or what we even mean with words such as fact and lies in politics. A general aim of the present study is to shed light on these questions. Not, however, (...) by engaging directly in the debate about post-truth, but by investigating the relation between politics and truth in the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In 1945 Arendt suggested that fascism had invented a way of “lying the truth”. She later came to call this invention the modern political lie, seeing it as one of the key elements that crystallized into totalitarianism. The study explores the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements, which can reinvent itself in non-totalitarian forms in contemporary democracies. Parts of Arendt’s analysis are implicit but can be made explicit against the background of Heidegger’s political writings. Heidegger is not an advocate of the modern political lie, nonetheless his writings from the 1930s, while a member of the National Socialist party, reflect aspects of the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements. Studying Heidegger and Arendt together can therefore shed light on the specific problems that Arendt addressed regarding truth and lying in politics. The study investigates the relation between politics and truth in Heidegger and Arendt respectively, but also the relation between their works. It shows that there is a proto-political aspect already in Heidegger’s early articulations of truth as aletheia and explores the central role of truth in his political writings from the 1930s. Against the background of Heidegger, Arendt’s works on the modern political lie are analyzed. The study also investigates the concept of truth developed by Arendt in works after The Origins of Totalitarianism, arguing that it should be seen partly as a response to the modern political lie. (shrink)

This article addresses Rancière’s critique of Aristotle’s political theory as parapolitics in order to show that Aristotle is a resource for developing an inclusionary notion of political community. Rancière argues that Aristotle attempts to cut off politics and merely police (maintain) the community by eliminating the political claim of the poor by including it. I respond to three critiques that Rancière makes of Aristotle: that he ends the political dispute by including the demos in the government; that he includes the (...) free masses only incidentally because, by chance, the rule is political, not based on mastery; and that he attempts to close off politics by determining in advance what speech counts as speech. I argue that Aristotle attempts to institute this contest by accepting the incommensurable claims of arithmetic and geometric equality. Aristotle puts this conflict at the root of political life in such a way that serves Rancière’s larger project of perpetuating politics. (shrink)

Owing to the analytic tradition, contemporary analytic existentialism deliberately avoids metaphysical discussions to the detriment of the field. Specifically, Thaddeus Metz’ Fundamentality Theory invokes metaphysical categories without adequately clarifying what they really mean. This paper aims to remedy these problems by formulating a theory of meaning in life grounded on the metaphysical category of truth. Deriving from Alain Badiou’s relevant writings, this paper formulates a theory of meaning in life based on a metaphysical notion of truth with the particular advantage (...) of compensating for Fundamentality Theory’s (1) lack of metaphysical grounding, and (2) the inherent vagueness of its two central notions: fundamentality and substantiality. I argue that the Badiouan Theory that this paper formulates opens up the field to the rich conceptual repertoire of metaphysics and that it designates substantiality as fidelity to truths, while designating truths as fundamental. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the (...) seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with Arendt’s political theory, particularly those elements of it concerned with political institutions. It treats her work as a response to a mis-conceptualisation of politics as being fundamentally formed of rulership and command, which is to say that she opposes treating sovereignty as an essential component of political practice. What Arendt offers, as an alternative, is a full-fledged account of how politics could operate in the absence of sovereignty. This thesis argues that it is a coherent (...) picture, consistent across the course of her work. A particularly important element of this consistency is the closeness of fit between the material which forms the basis of Arendt’s understanding of politics and her account of political foundations. To do so, the thesis begins with a discussion of Arendt’s concept of ‘action’, which forms the basis of her understanding of politics. One of the most distinctive features of this is the importance of individual initiative, understood as responsiveness to the already given. This part of action is an essential part of linking it harmoniously to those other elements of her work which appear here. Arendt’s work on ‘judgment’ is the focus of its own chapter; it is important because judgment is Arendt’s conceptualisation of political discussion modelled on opinion, which has previously been treated as a late-career development, is here treated as consistent with and, essentially, an extension of, certain features of action. On the basis of this combined reading of action and judgment, it is possible to read Arendt’s description of political foundations as an example of the same kind of political activity. Contra Honig’s reading of the political foundation as an opportunity for resistance, this thesis treats it as a political act which invites the participation of later citizens. Finally, an account of Arendt’s institutional thought is completed by presenting her description of the ‘council system’ in combination with Thomas Jefferson’s ‘ward system’. The two combine to form an example of political organisation which both does without a reliance on sovereignty and maximises opportunities for meaningful political engagement. (shrink)

In this work, I present an interpretation of two thinkers, Foucault and Arendt. I place these thinkers within a tradition of critical theory running from Kant to Nietzsche. The opposition between modernism and postmodernism, between its philosophical sources, Kant and Nietzsche, has been widely overstated, for example, in the polemical stance taken by Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse ofModenfity (1987). 1 am concerned to show that this way of mapping does Foucault and Arendt an injustice. Foucault and Arendt accept Nietzsche's (...) critique of reason and Western thought and attack Kant's official philosophy, an analytical philosophy of truth. Yet they also appropriate Kant's reflection on the Enlightenment and revolution (Foucault) and his aesthetic judgment (Arendt). More importantly, Foucault and Arendt embrace postmodern sensibility not as an absolute given but as an attitude that must be - at the risk of inviting Nietzschean scorn - constantly checked and examined. For them, critique is based as much on a serious and sustained interrogation of historical experience as it is on a deconstruction of metaphysical philosophy. Recognizing the problems of attaching labels to Foucault's work and that of Arendt, I focus on the tensions and complexity of their work. There are tensions in Foucault's thought between totalizing/detotalizing impulses, discursive/extra-discursive theorization, macro/micro perspectives, and domination/resistance relations as well as between ethical-political commitments and archaeological detachment. There are also tensions in Arendt's thought between creative rupture and exercise in retrieval, between agonism and consensus as well as between existential engagement and philosophical withdrawal. Critical thought, which is experiment as well as problematization, must constantly live within a field of tension. In this light, I argue that these tensions provide the elements for the uniqueness and coherence of their work and that viewing these tensions as a source of flagrant contradiction fundamentally distorts their intentions. (shrink)

Recent studies of peacebuilding highlight the importance of attending to people’s local experiences of conflict and cooperation. This trend, however, raises the fundamental questions of how the local is and should be constituted and what the relationship is between institutions and individual actors of peace at the local level of politics. I turn to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts to address these issues. Arendt’s thinking provides a distinctive form of realism that calls for stable institutions but never depletes the spirit of resistance. (...) Peacebuilding guided by this insight seeks to enable parties in conflict to voice their competing opinions by acting agonistically in public and to help them align their disruptive yet creative voices with a desire to establish and sustain common institutions. Thus, Arendt’s thinking not only offers a way to increase sensitivity to local differences but also to provide direction to the politics of resistance. In the end, it offers a balanced insight into peacebuilding and local agency beyond the contemporary liberal and critical approaches to peace. (shrink)

El primer propósito de este artículo es considerar el fenómeno del pensamiento en Hannah Arendt. El segundo propósito es establecer en qué sentido, según esta autora, la actividad del pensamiento puede ser una condición contra la maldad. Como en su determinación del pensar Hannah Arendt se vuelve polémicamente contra todo intento por ver el pensar ya como un ejercicio intelectual, ya como una actividad puramente mental, ya como la fundación o prosecución de tradiciones de pensamiento, ya como el monopolio de (...) unos pocos, ya como la elaboración de doctrinas o sistemas…, el texto muestra subrepticiamente esta confrontación constante de Arendt con la tradición filosófica. Tal confrontación con la tradición filosófica tiene lugar al hilo de una conversación permanente con Sócrates, en cuyos diálogos advirtió Hannah Arendt un ejemplo inequívoco de la actividad del pensamiento. (shrink)